"You get only one loss, and it’s Russian roulette: Any given night could be the game with your name on it," Jennings writes in an Atlantic essay expressing appreciation for James Holzhauer's Jeopardy! winning streak. "You could play a dominant game, but still catch a bad break or two—a missed Final Jeopardy, a Daily Double found by someone else. I think there were about a dozen games in my streak where my win hinged on a single question. Incredibly, they all went my way. Until the 13th game, when one didn’t." Jennings adds: "There was something beautiful, I think, in the James Holzhauer news cycle. For two months, one of the most irresistible news stories in America was about Jeopardy!, a 55-year-old media property. It seemed so wholesome and old-timey, a story that Snapchatting teens and their grandparents were all following at once. It brought back good memories of 2004 for me, but it also reminded me of a time before the cultural landscape balkanized into a thousand niches, before middlebrow America went away, before politics and everything else dumbed down. For a little while, we just wanted to watch someone blow our minds by knowing stuff."
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TOPICS: Ken Jennings, Jeopardy!, SportsCenter, Alex Trebek, Conan O'Brien, Emma Boettcher, James Holzhauer, Jimmy Kimmel, Game Shows